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Sapphire has got its shrink-ray online again with this tiny AMD Fusion board, the Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini E350.

AMD's long-awaited, and even longer talked-about, Fusion technology has finally seen the light of day with a few motherboard manufacturers offering boards built around it.

Fusion is the world's first APU (Accelerated Processor Unit); a combination of a dual core processor, Northbridge controller and a DX11 supporting graphics processor all built into the same piece of silicon and is AMD's belated riposte to Intel's dual core version of the Atom.

The compact nature of the technology has enabled the board producers to have another go at trying to persuade people that the tiny (17cm square) ITX format is a serious proposition, but unfortunately that's a road that the past 10 years has seen a number of companies disappear down.

Long-time AMD partner Sapphire currently has two boards based on the Fusion technology, the Pure White Fusion E350 (IPC-E350M1W) and the subject of our review, the Pure Fusion Mini E350 (IPC-E350M1), the differences between the two are the type of memory supported.

The SAPPHIRE Pure Fusion Mini E350 is a mini-ITX mainboard featuring the E350 (Zacate) APU from AMD. Zacate is the first generation of APU a combination of CPU and GPU computing technologies onto a single die to improve the performance of both visual and data-intensive tasks. For the first time it combines high-performance serial computing and parallel graphics processing cores on a single chip.

Despite the huge feature set, the SAPPHIRE Pure Mini E350 features very low power consumption. Its very compact mini-ITX (170 x 170mm) format is ideal for integration into small format or embedded systems. It supports Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems for a new class of performance from highly integrated systems.